As an apparent change of administration proceeds apace, one likelihood is that Jim Bridenstine will not run NASA under a Biden presidency. Bridenstine recently took himself out of the running. His stated reason is that Team Biden will need someone whom it can trust and work with. Bridenstine, even though he has been relentlessly nonpartisan in his stewardship of the space agency, remains a Republican.
Bridenstine will be a tough act to follow. Despite having been roughed up during his confirmation hearings, he won over his former critics. Bridenstine has been rightfully praised for his stewardship of the Artemis return to the moon program and for getting the commercial crew program literally off the launch pad. He will be missed, though very likely, since he is just 45, Bridenstine’s career of advancing the cause of space exploration is far from over.
In the meantime, Team Biden is said to be interested in naming a woman for the administrator post. Kendra Horn, current chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, and Lori Garver, former NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, have been mentioned. Both women would be poor choices.
Horn is the sponsor of a NASA authorization bill that would have crippled the Artemis program. It prohibited the construction of a lunar base and the use of lunar resources to sustain astronauts on the moon’s surface. The proposed bill also would have forbidden NASA from acquiring a human lunar landing system commercially. NASA would be obliged to develop and “own” the next lunar lander outright, just as during Apollo. The bill proved to be so controversial that as of this writing it has not advanced past the House Science Committee.
Lori Garver is blamed for enabling Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation program, President George W. Bush’s attempt to send astronauts to the moon and on to Mars. Furthermore, she is the author of a recent op-ed that suggested abandoning space exploration altogether and turning NASA into a climate change agency. More recently, Garver seemed to soften her opposition to space exploration but still expounded the primacy of climate change mitigation.
Fortunately, Team Biden has an exceptional candidate for NASA administrator in the person of Kathy Lueders, currently NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. Before she was named in charge of HEO, Lueders managed the Commercial Crew Program and saw it to success. Artemis and the International Space Station are part of her portfolio.
Lueders is well respected and liked on both sides of the aisle and across the aerospace industry. Moreover, Lueders is a career NASA engineer and manager. She is not political.
If Team Biden nominates Lueders for NASA administrator, they will have accomplished several things. First, they will have picked an exceptionally qualified candidate. Second, the Biden team will have signaled that they are not abandoning the Artemis program, even though some reports suggest that Biden would like to focus on climate change research at the expense of space exploration. Finally, in Lueders, the incoming administration will have nominated a person who is easily confirmable. The same cannot be said for Horn or Garver, both of whom are political and controversial.
For most incoming administrations, first impressions last the longest. That principle applies to space policy as much as to anything else. President Kennedy will be remembered forever for his pledge to land a man on the moon and return him safely back to the Earth by the end of the 1960s. Obama will also be remembered, though in a less kindly fashion, for his abrupt decision to abandon a return to the moon effort.
Biden has a chance to make a good first impression, a thing he desperately needs, by naming a competent, talented woman to manage NASA and to continue the quest to expand American civilization beyond the confines of this planet.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
